This is well deserved. When the game first launched I could tell something was off about it. It obviously had a dreadful launch.
I can’t remember how many years later I was in the mood for a space exploration and saw NMS had an update. I grabbed it for about £8. Since purchasing it seeing constant substantial updates has been amazing. Every time one comes out I think “Ok guys, you’ve redeemed yourselves, you’re allowed to stop now!”
I like to work on a £1 per hour with my games, I’ve played 85 hours (I know, rookie numbers compared to what some people have) and I’m really pleased with my purchase.
Seeing the pride they have in their game and the efforts they have gone to to make the game they wanted and the lessons Hello Games have learnt, it leaves me looking forward to Light No Fire.
You need to ditch the money/hour metric. It’s not as useful as it seems. There’s a big difference between an hour of enjoyment and an hour just getting to the next piece of content. Most open world games you’ll end up putting far more time into but get less enjoyment out of than a well put together smaller game. An hour of non-enjoyment is a negative in my opinion.
This may be controversial, especially in this thread, but NMS is mostly non-enjoyment for me. The amount of meaningful stuff I did in the game pales in comparison to the amount of just traversing and wasting time.
I respect the devs for the amount of work they’ve done improving the game, but it’s not the game for me. I know there are some others who actually enjoy the traveling, so it’s not wasted time for them, but not me.
Money/hour is a metric crested by big game publishers. First, it’s an easy metric to brag about and control, where quality is not. Second, it’s a lot harder for smaller studios to compete with. Enjoyment/hour is far more even and also what most people care about more, but it’s harder to measure.
Because I bought it blind (no expectations), I actually enjoyed the game at launch. It was very chill.
Okay now I might buy it just for the redemption arc.
I did exactly that after watching the video about it by the Internet historian
It’s a fantastic game now!
It was a pretty good game a year or so in, and has only gotten better. I haven’t played for a while, but I put over 100 hours in first.
I come back to it every few months but I never managed to really dig the game, that said I’m truly impressed but all the work that was delivered post launch to deliver the game that was promised and even more.
I tried it for a couple weeks and enjoyed it but I felt like I got the gist of it in that time. I had a set of bases going that could make me tons of money every couple days and after that I was just like… welp what now? If the flight mechanics had been more like Elite Dangerous or the X series it would have hooked me longer probably. It certainly has more to do than than ED does but it didn’t keep me engaged nearly as long. The flying around is way more fun when it doesn’t feel like you’re on rails.
I’m the same way. I feel like I check it out after every expansion but it never really grabs me. To me, most of the systems feel quite separate from each other, and a lot of stuff feels the same despite procedural generation (space stations, buildings and bases on planets, planets themselves). I feel like a tighter focus would make for a more engaging game, but there are obviously tens of thousands of people enjoying its current state
The procedural generation is the issue for me. Everything feels the same, even though it’s random. The animals all do the same stuff, they’re just made of different parts… And the “stuff” that they do is basically just walk around. The planets are just lumpy noise. There are no forests, just evenly distributed trees and plants.
Yeah I feel the game is really missing exciting combat and raids. Got bored pretty fast.
That would probably make it more interesting for many, but it was never meant to be a combat focused game so it makes sense that they haven’t added it.
yeah but i mean come on, it’s a core fundamental feature, you’d think they’d bother to make it at least decent, especially with all the insane patching work they’ve done, you’d figure one of them would be a combat overhaul, but i’m still waiting!
Doesn’t that imply it isn’t a core feature from the perspective of the devs? If they haven’t enhanced it by now, I wouldn’t expect them to going forward. For what it’s worth, the lackluster space combat is my biggest gripe with the game, but I just don’t play NMS when I’m looking for a space dogfight then.
if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have you do it so often.
if it was a deterrent from doing certain things, they wouldn’t make it so easy.
NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.
There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.
In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.
It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.
Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.
This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…
Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.
I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(
Wow, I heard about that when it entered early access, and it’s my sort of game. I was waiting for release though. I guess I just didn’t hear about it. They probably chose a bad time to release too, so close to the Factorio DLC. It sounds like they messed up though. I’ll have to think again about if I’ll pick it up considering the changes you mentioned. I hope they can recover because it was a good concept at least.
It’s available on game pass, if you have it.
I played it there so much that I figured I owed it to the devs to actually buy it on Steam, and I don’t regret it, had a ton of fun
There is a great video about NMS redemption arc but I can’t find it, it’s not this one from the Internet Historian, it was someone else I think https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ?si=x0BkndpLB_TGsN56
An astounding story of what could have happened if we hadn’t arrested Elizabeth Holmes and let Theranos just keep going.
Probably means its no longer playable for me
